Paleoecology Blogs

See you at #AGU2015

I’m heading to AGU early this year, part of the Neotoma Annual Meeting at Berkeley. We’ve recently been awarded an NSF EarthCube Integrated Activities award to harmonize Neotoma and the Paleobiology Database (and other allied paleobiological archives), but we’ve also made some big gains in working with allied Plio-Pleistocene databases and researchers across the globe in adding to Neotoma’s already considerable data holdings.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming Neotoma meeting. One very exciting development is our partnership with the University of Wisconsin’s Library System. We’ve been working toward providing data contributors with persistent Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their contributions. Our work with the UW Library System has seen a new contract established between the UW Libraries and DataCite, which gives us access not only to DOI minting, but also new connections to a set of established metadata standards and a robust API for minting DOIs, editing metadata and searching for contributions.

My own poster [GC11E-1065] goes up on Monday Morning (so get registered early!) as part of the Dating the Anthropocene session. There was a great paper in Eos in the last issue (What is the Anthropocene? by L. Edwards) that lays out some options for ways in which geoscientists might treat the Anthropocene. My work in the Upper Midwestern United States leads me to believe that there is a clear and persistent signal of human agency on the landscape, but it’s time transgressive, and it varies. It was nice to see Edwards point to some of the pioneering work by the great Canadian palynologist Jock McAndrews, but the signal of EuroAmerican settlement is so broad it clearly represents a state change (see our pre-print here, now in review), as opposed to the signal of earlier human land use, nicely reviewed in Munoz et al (2014). If you want to talk about it, come find me on Monday!

So, once again, a very busy AGU for me, and I haven’t even mentioned Kevin Burke’s great poster on Monday morning. Having finished his M.Sc Kevin is on to more great work modeling the influence of changing wind fields on our ability to reconstruct past vegetation from pollen data.

Hope to see you at AGU, I’ll be there from Friday to Wednesday, so if you’d like to get in touch, let me know!